Organise your menu bar

Use Bartender 2 to quickly organise and search your menu bar’s status icons

Use Bartender 2 to quickly organise and search all of your menu extras

Icons at the right end of the menu bar provide quick access to settings and alerts, but OS X has a strange relationship with third-party ones. Those provided with the system – Volume, Clock, AirPort, and so on – can be rearranged, and accessed using the keyboard by pressing ≈+*. However, third-party icons are blocked from both.

Enter Bartender (macbartender.com), which enables you to organise all menu bar icons, along with a host of other things. We’ll assume you’ve installed the four-week trial version. You’ll need to access its preferences, which is done by clicking the app’s own menu bar icon, then the cog, then Preferences.

When you open Bartender for the first time, it’ll rearrange your menu bar icons in semi-random fashion. However, it will remember any subsequent changes you make. Quit it and your menu bar will revert to how it was before. Also, if an icon doesn’t behave regarding your Bartender settings, quit and reopen its app. One final tip: if you have lots of icons, activate Bartender and then type to search; it’ll filter the selection as you type, Spotlight-style. Craig Grannell